Delicious Library 2 and the iPhone
Posted by Trejkaz Mon, 14 Jul 2008 04:42:39 GMT
Delicious Library 2’s “iPhone export” is quite awful. My complaints with its output include, but are not limited to the following.
- It only shows 12 books per page (can be fixed with a new template.)
- It shows JPEG image thumbnails for each book, which wastes bandwidth and screen space (can be fixed with a new template.)
- It is by default about 1cm too narrow for the iPhone screen, and this wasted space could be used to display more data or increase the font size.
- When you click an item, it goes straight to Amazon, not an iPhone-friendly summary page for the item on your own server.
- It shows the items in some arbitrary order (or at very least is not ordered by purchase, nor ordered by author, title, series title or genre.)
- It has no means to search through the list.
In particular, because of #5 and #6, finding all items in a single series is practically impossible, and thus it is also impossible to determine the next volume in a series which you are missing from your collection. These last two issues also exist with the normal browser HTML views.
It turns out DL2 puts a “DeliciousLibrary2Dump.deliciousShare” file in the same directory which contains the entire library in compressed XML (actually XML plist) format. I’m going to propose making some basic webapp which can read this file when it updates and refresh a database, which will make it possible to do things like sorting and searches, thus turning the DL2 export into a viable feature.
Maybe this will give me something to do while listening through my music collection (I found some dud files so now I have to check the whole thing.)